Traitor
by SerendipityV2.5
Summary: The lives of the Uchiha brothers were always destined to be short and violent. However, thanks to an unbelievably stubborn blonde and a moment of hesitation, their path's begin to slowly change for the better. Uchiha focus. Mild AU. DEFINITELY NOT Sas/Ita ROMANCE.
1. Betrayal

AN: So, this isn't the first story I've ever written. But it is the first I've ever published, electronically or otherwise. As such, reviews, ideas, speculations, and other such discussions are welcome. I'll say it now: this will be mildly AU, both because of how events in the story will change things in canon (more on that later), but also because I _suck_ at keeping up with Naruto. Also, as a new author, any OOC'ness is probably my fault, so feel free to mention that if you see any. Just keep in mind: Itachi is thirteen, not nineteen like his first appearance in canon.

And with that (unnecessarily long) note: please, enjoy.

Traitor

**Chapter 1: Broken**

He stumbled away from his home. He had to hurry. The dogs would be after him soon. Dogs in white masks. His old friends and comrades.

Not anymore. One more thing thrown away that could never be retrieved.

As he ran, he reached the edge of the compound, where concrete and bamboo became wooded forest, and he threw himself forward into the darkness. Darkness was good. Darkness would slow down his pursuers, keep him hidden for just a little while longer and give him a few more crucial seconds to escape. Get away from the scene of the crime.

He'd never be able to escape from what he had done, he knew, but right now he didn't care. The night made the forest blacker than his eyes, even with the full and crimson harvest moon shining down. The canopy was too thick.

The bloody tears streaming from his eyes didn't help matters at all.

His eyes _burned_. They felt like thick, gooey clots, forced into his sockets and stuck there with hot glue, electrified and fastened with no care for their fragility. He'd once fractured his arm in three places and then used it anyway to break the neck of one of his targets, but the pain in his eyes made that memory seem like a hangnail.

His head hurt too. He hadn't taken a blow to the head (or anywhere else), so he didn't know why it was. He distractingly hoped that he didn't have brain damage. He had no idea what his new eyes might have done to his head. In his state, it never occurred to him that the anguish he felt there could be entirely mental instead of physical.

But even with the agony that seemed to have replaced his eyes and the midnight blackness surrounding him, he made his way through the forest on sure feet. No roots tripped him, and when he took to the tree, he didn't slip from any of the branches that he launched himself from in a desperate attempt to put more distance between himself and his home. Even now, he was too good for that.

As he ran, he thought, words and images dripping through his heads like the blood had run through is home. The first absurdity came quickly, an upset so trivial compared to what he had just done, yet it hit him like gut punch.

_I'm an orphan._ He thought. _Only thirteen, and an orphan. _Thirteen wasn't that young, he reassured himself. Sixty years ago, he'd already be halfway through his life. Plenty of people back then had been orphans since they were born. That and other thoughts shone through his turgid mind as his body fled, completely on autopilot.

_It was necessary._ That one had been with him a long time now. For several days now. All that had changed about it was the tense. _Was, is, will be_. _Better that it be by me than by _him_, and better them than the rest of the village. _He knew it was a lie. And a poor one. He just wished that he was alone in his head, so that he could bear the lie in peace. Maybe with enough quiet he could manage it, too.

But of course it wasn't quiet. His wasn't the only voice in his head.

_Where are you going?_

_(Thump)_

_Leaving so soon?_

_(Thump)_

_Stop!_

_(Thump)_

_Why are you doing this!?_

_Big brother, please stop this! _

The darkness may have been no obstacle. His eyes, seemingly blind as they were, may have been of little consideration. But the memory of that voice struck Itachi out of the canopy as surely as a bolt of lightning would have. He hit the ground, gasping, more tears spilling from his burning eyes. Staggering to his feet and rubbing them furiously, futilely trying to get the pain to just _go away_, he took of running again.

He couldn't breathe.

No matter the scale of what had been averted, it was most definitely _not_ worth it.

And unless Sarutobi held to his word, wasn't backed into a corner, wasn't manipulated by Danzo, wasn't left with no other choice…

If the man in the mask came back…

Then, it would have all been for nothing.

He'd left Sasuke back there. Back in the wreckage of the clan, amongst the bodies of his parents and friends. He couldn't have done anything else. He couldn't kill his brother. He wouldn't. But he needed him to be strong. Stronger than himself.

Strong enough to finish what Itachi had started this night, and end the clan for good. Not because Itachi wanted to die, though he desperately did. He could wait for that. No, Sasuke needed to be strong for the only other Uchiha left.

Madara. Madara Uchiha.

The father of the clan; progenitor, primarch, former ruler, and slayer.

Because it wouldn't be entirely correct to say that Itachi Uchiha had been his clan's sole executioner. He'd shared that honor with his great-great grandfather, after all. The man had taken the lion's share of the work, in fact. Itachi hadn't seen him, but he'd been there: he'd seen the mask, carnival-like and sinister at the same time, and heard the screams throughout the compound.

He couldn't possibly defeat Madara on his own. And he couldn't possibly go to the village, warn them. He'd be dead before he finished the thought. Because above all else, the greatest of the Uchiha was old, he was crafty, and he was _strong_. Itachi had thought that he was a great shinobi, that he was a prodigy. He hadn't flaunted it: in fact, somewhat paradoxically, he prided himself on his humility. But tonight, he had seen that he was _nothing_. That compared to his ancestor, he was just another fumbling civilian. The man had killed over seventy sharingan-wielding police in under an hour, with none of them getting out a call for aid. That kind of power frankly made Itachi want to throw up.

Which he did. He kept running, though. He couldn't afford to stop. The taste of bile in his mouth was overwhelming.

He couldn't even comprehend those abilities. But he could think of a way to beat them. It was clear that the modern Uchiha were _had been_ weak. Itachi didn't know why. Perhaps their blood had thinned over the decades. Or maybe living in the political arena rather than on the battlefield had degraded them. Or perhaps they were all just unlucky, and Madara had been a freak even in his own time. Regardless...

Itachi knew that couldn't kill Madara on his own. Even with his newly awakened Mangekyo. He wouldn't stand a chance, would be cut down, would have all of the sacrifices that he had made rendered completely worthless in an instant.

But Itachi and his brother...

Itachi was strong; certainly not on the level of someone like Madara, but nevertheless the strongest in generations, and a genius besides. But Sasuke was his brother, and though he hadn't shown it as quickly he had the same genes and the same potential. Itachi would make Sasuke stronger. He'd planted a seed tonight. A seed of hatred, of helplessness and tragedy, and Itachi knew better than any other thirteen-year-old how those things could ferment and burst open and produce incredible warriors. He had been one of those products, after all. And so, he'd given his brother a push along a path that the young man couldn't back away from.

Sasuke wouldn't forgive him. He knew that. Itachi couldn't even forgive himself. But so long as his little brother grew, so long as he became powerful, powerful enough that they would be able to slay Madara together, Itachi would face his brother's rage with a smile on his face.

The village first, his clan second, his brother's future strength above all else. That was what was important. Itachi didn't even factor himself into that equation. Madara threatened all of those things. He had to be destroyed.

No matter the cost.

He killed three more former comrades that night. Rat, Falcon, Porcupine. ANBU, all of them. The first had been a lookout: no doubt sent ahead to keep him from traveling farther from the village, or at least to slow him down and alert his former comrades. In that, the man failed miserably. Itachi didn't even slow down as he leapt forward and buried his katana into the scout. Or rather, the log that the man had become. But the quick Kawarimi was no obstacle for Itachi. The path of chakra that marked the man's pseudo-teleportation was clear to his aching eyes as a ray of sunlight in the opaque forest. Without even turning his head, he flung three kunai towards its destination, in a staggered spread. And though he didn't see them strike the newly materialized ANBU in the shoulder, chest, and throat, he heard the wet gurgle and thump as the man proceeded to choke on his blood and fall from the trees. Weak. That man couldn't help him against Madara.

_Your family is already gone. What's one more?_

The falcon had been trickier. Itachi hadn't even known he was coming before the kunai took him in the upper shoulder. He'd shadowed Itachi for a while, waiting for a moment of distraction, and then tried to end him with a single quick blade. Unfortunately for the falcon, the ANBU armor Itachi himself wore kept the knife from penetrating too far into his shoulder, and as he turned in midair and slid backwards along the grass, he had flung a kunai straight up towards his pursuer... and missed the falcon-faced man by a couple meters. The ANBU had swept down, trying to capitalize on the opening. He swung his ninjato out, taking Itachi in the neck. And the newly minted missing-nin burst into a swarm of angry ravens, blinding the man. The kunai he had thrown, meanwhile, had burst in a puff of smoke and revealed itself as the Uchiha prodigy, his hands already cupped in front of his mouth for a fireball.

Afterwards, the forest was burning, fire spreading through some of the dryer trees, and the falcon mask had cracked from the heat. It's owner fared no better.

_What's one more?_

The porcupine had nearly killed Itachi. He was ambushed as he reached the edge of the forest, near the Valley of the End. Once he reached that ancient monument to his village's founders and his clan's killer, he'd be able to follow the river west past Mumei no Kuni and into Tsuchi no Kuni, the Land of Earth. It would be easy to get lost there, in the mountainous ranges and deadly, wind-swept valleys.

The ambush had been two-fold: a hail of kage bunshin senbon, and a pair of hands reaching out of a nearby tree, pinning him to the bark as they wrapped around his throat and drew him back.

A genjutsu, but Itachi had been running flat out for almost three hours straight, hounded by other ANBU the whole way, and in his exhaustion he didn't check for a trap relieved beyond thought at having finally reached the valley. His sharingan had been off: he couldn't have handled the drain for much longer.

He should have died then, pierced through by dozens of needles or strangled by the enraged kunoichi behind him. Ignominious, but he wouldn't have complained. By then, he had concluded that the whole exercise was pointless, that the village was doomed, that he had damaged Sasuke for nothing.

The fatigue was doing strange things to his brain.

It wasn't to be though. Instead of the stabs of the senbon, he instead felt an intense heat whirl by his face. He closed his eyes, an instinctive reaction and one that he cursed the moment he did so, and when he opened them again the rain of glinting needles was gone. Instead, his face and chest were spattered with hot ash: painful, burning ash, but a definite improvement over razor sharp steel. Of course, he was still being strangled.

But that sensation vanished too, as something took hold of his hand and _pulled_, and when the nausea faded and the world had swirled back into something somewhat resembling the forests edge, he was thirty feet away and the kunoichi was grasping at empty air, a confused look on her face.

He didn't realise it till nearly an hour later, but Madara had saved him with his strange teleportation jutsu.

But at the time, Itachi's larynx was bruised and his eyes were burning and he felt so _stupid_ for getting caught by such an obvious trap that he _glared_ at the kunoichi and was only mildly surprised when she burst into flames darker than the lake at the valley's base.

_And another?_

It felt like it was _his_ eye that had been set afire, but he didn't even care. He just wanted to sleep.

He didn't.

Itachi Uchiha ran for another five hours, until daybreak finally came, peaking over the mountains that he had suddenly found himself surrounded by at some point earlier. When he saw the sun, he collapsed. Unconscious for only a moment, he rose soon afterwards, and spent the next thirty minutes searching for shelter. It was a cave that finally caught his eye, dark and forbidding and hopefully empty, but he wouldn't have cared if the entirety of Konoha were waiting inside as he crawled in and passed out before he got more than twenty feet.

He had strange dreams as he slept. Which was unusual in of itself, because Itachi never dreamed.

Oh, he had dreams for the future. He had aspirations and hopes and wishes, concepts and ideas that he had wished to become reality but which had all turned to dust in the last two weeks. Now, his only wish was to murder his ancestor before he himself died. Now, his wish was that his brother would become strong enough to help him kill that ancestor before no doubt slaying Itachi as well.

But as for dreams, the kind that snuck up on people as they slept true sleep and threw them into a world unlike and yet achingly familiar to their own: Itachi never had those. He slept the sleep of the dead, and awoke at a moments notice. Nothing rolled behind his eyes as he did this, no symbolic interactions or esoteric imagery or even mundane repetitions of daily events.

Itachi spent his night in darkness and silence. It had always been like that.

But this night was different. This night he was haunted in his own mind.

When Sasuke had found him, Itachi had been standing over the bodies of his parents. He'd been standing there for quite a while. His mother's last words had been echoing through his mind.

_We'll always love you, Itachi._

His father had looked like he might disagree, but Mikoto Uchiha had been nothing but honest, even as she wept bitter tears. Itachi had been mirroring her, but the tears hadn't stopped his sword from biting into her neck.

And so, his parents fell dead, and Itachi had been left staring at what had once been them but now were just empty shells, cruel facsimile's that surely existed only to taunt him with the fact that his parents were gone, never coming back, and that it was all his fault.

When Sasuke had burst in, his little brother had had no idea what was happening. He'd been gibbering, panicked. A completely natural reaction for a seven year old, even one who was training to be a shinobi. He hadn't understood the weight of what had happened, what Itachi had done. His perception couldn't comprehend the transgression on his reality. Big brothers didn't kill their entire family. Big brothers were cool and carried you when you sprained your ankle and said that they would teach you how to breath fire another time.

"_Nii-san__, why did you do this?"_

"_To test my limits."_

A lie. Another unbearable one to add to the rest he'd told himself and others that night. But the truth was even more so.

Itachi had made his little brother understand.

Tsukuyomi. The only way to be sure. It left no room for doubt, no margin for error, no possible way for Sasuke to justify his brother's actions, to grow up apologizing for him instead of training to kill him. He showed Sasuke _exactly_ what had happened. What his "Nii-san" had done. And, though Sasuke didn't know it, what Itachi imagined Madara had done as well.

Itachi groaned when Sasuke hit the floor. Sasuke's own cry drowned it out. Itachi didn't know if the scream was because of the sudden pain in his eyes or something else entirely. But as he watched his brother lie on the wood, dreadfully still, his eyes unseeing, his mouth open for the ragged breaths he gasped down, the genius son had such a surge of self-loathing that it took more control then he had exercised the entire night not to take his katana and drive it through his own chest.

But he knew he had made the right decision when Sasuke lurched to his feet, his face twisted in a rictus of hatred and utter terror, with red eyes and a single, lazily spinning tomoe.

His brother was stronger. His brother would grow stronger. Because now his brother had a goal, a single overriding purpose, one that would carry him through any challenge.

Kill the man who had taken his family away. Kill Itachi Uchiha.

What Itachi had shown to Sasuke, he spent the night reliving. But while Tsukuyomi only incapacitated someone for seventy-two hours, this nightmare never ended. Whether it was mere years or the decades it seemed Itachi would never know.

He did not sleep well.

He was awoken by a kick to the ribs. The force of the blow rolled him over, but after just a second of confusion he'd sprung to his feet, exhaustion forgotten. His hands came up, his feet slid back... and then everything went limp. He crashed to the stone floor; the events of last night sending him down like a sack of bricks. He wasn't unconscious, though he really wished that he were. His eyes ached, his back ached, his shoulder was sluggishly bleeding, and his nose was newly broken.

He struggled to prop his chin up, to look into the face of his attacker. As his gaze rose he found himself staring into an orange mask, a whirlpool like swirl upon it, with a single eyehole. The mask was affixed to the face of a man who crouched over him, his head cocked to the left, looking for all the world like a curious dog.

Through the solitary hole stared a crimson orb, a continuous circle with three comma-like tomoe languidly rotating in it. It was hypnotizing. Itachi considered throwing up again, but decided against it.

He didn't know how Madara Uchiha would react to being vomited on.

Probably violently.

"Finally awake I see." For such an old man, that voice was far too hearty. And for someone who had just spent the night slaughtering elite ninja (most of which were distantly his grandchildren) like helpless sheep, it was far too cheerful.

Itachi didn't say anything. He couldn't. It had never occurred to him that Madara would be just _standing there _when he woke up. He had no time to prepare, to think.

So instead of doing that, he just said, "Yes." Nothing offensive about that. Madara couldn't possibly construe that as an insult, a challenge, or one of the other half-dozen things that would give him a reason to end Itachi right there.

Madara twitched his head the other way, a lightning quick motion that was over before it had really begun. It was the kind of movement that screamed "unhinged" to Itachi, but he didn't dare let that thought show in his eyes. Instead, he just asked, "How long was I asleep?"

His great-great-great grandfather seemed to consider that for a second, before deciding that, yes, Itachi probably wouldn't be able to kill him with that information.

"About five hours."

Five hours. That was more than he expected. Madara had done him a kindness, or so the man must have thought. Itachi would have preferred to have not slept at all.

Then again, perhaps the man in the mask had known _exactly_ what a "kindness" sleep would be.

They both watched each other for a moment, Itachi being careful to not make any movement at all, like an animal being stalked by a much more dangerous predator, and Madara studying his face. What he was looking for, Itachi didn't know, but whatever it was, the ancient man must have found it, because he stood up suddenly and offered Itachi his hand.

"We are the last of the Uchiha now, Itachi. All of those other weakling pretenders are dead." There was a kind of childlike glee in those words that scared Itachi more than the man's prowess ever had. Cold-blooded killers were easy for Itachi to understand. He was one, after all. As much as he abhorred violence, he also knew all to well the ease with which someone could shut themselves off and let instinct take over, cold logic and orders tamping down of thoughts and personal inclinations. He'd spent most of last night in that state. But the kind of men who took _joy_ in killing, the men who unleashed themselves in combat, rather then guide themselves into it: those kind of men sickened him. And frightened him, in a way, because he had no idea what motivated them, and he wasn't arrogant enough to think that he could come up with the answer.

It was clear that Madara was one of those men. He'd killed all but two members of his own family in a single night_,_ and loved every minute of it. He'd probably toyed with them the entire time: Itachi had seen Madara's speed, and his strange ability to pass through solid objects, and he knew that the man could have ended the fights he'd heard in the distance in five minutes. Yet the sounds of screaming had lasted for half an hour.

Madara, either uncaring or unsuspecting of what Itachi had realised about him, continued. "You can't go back to the village, Itachi. You're missing-nin now. They'll kill you on sight."

All true, and no more than he deserved. What was the man trying to truly say, in that gleeful, almost moronic tone?

"Fortunately, I am willing to offer you shelter."

There it was. An alliance. And a prison sentence. With Madara watching him, he wouldn't be able to help the village, even from a distance. He wouldn't be able to help Sasuke get stronger, whether by proxy or more direct visits.

But it was that, or death. Itachi didn't need to be a genius to realise that. The man would end him if he disobeyed this order couched as an offer of sanctuary.

So instead of doing what every instinct in his body desperately wanted him to do and throwing himself forward to skewer the madman on his sword, Itachi shakily grabbed Madara's hand and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet.

"Where?" He murmured nasally, the words feeling like lead weights on his dry tongue. He almost gagged with the import of them as drops of blood slid past his lips.

There was no going back.

Madara... did something with his head. The mask hid his face, but Itachi could easily tell from the way his eyelid dropped and his hands came up that the old man was smirking.

"Somewhere secret. Not to far to the south, actually. You can think of it as…" he paused, and tapped the place where his chin would be with a finger, "the new home of our clan."

And then Itachi felt an all too familiar tugging sensation, the world swirled into something grotesque and unrecognizable, and he left the cave, and whatever infinitesimal hope he had of returning to Konoha, behind.


	2. Setting the Stage

Chapter 2: Broken Home

He woke up in the hospital.

He didn't really perceive it at the time, but the hue of the room, that pale white non-color which characterized the walls surrounding him, gave it away. Shut curtains: white. Peeling wallpaper: white. Rumpled sheets: white. Uncomfortably warm pillow: white. Blinding ceiling lights: white.

He sat up and stopped, a distant ache in his head keeping him rigid.

He didn't move until a nurse walked in and found him sitting straight upright in bed, staring blankly forward. She screamed, and dropped the tray she'd been holding. Food, red

_eyes_

soup and crusts of bread, fell to the floor. The plastic bowl clattered, and the liquid flowed out along the

_hardwood floor, thick and_

linoleum whitish of the floor, a startling contrast of color in the white purgatory of the hospital room.

His head snapped towards the noise, and the nurse almost screamed again.

Then he was still. Unnaturally still.

Slowly, she approached him.

"Hello? Uchiha-kun?"

He ignored her. He kept staring at the door, expecting someone else to come walking in, expecting

_Itachi_

his mother to walk in and tell him that he'd given her such a fright, don't ever do that again, and then his father would follow and he would just _stare_ at him, weigh him, find him not strong enough, never good enough. But they would _be there_, they would be here with him, they would be _here_.

They wouldn't be-

_dead._

And afterwards he would go home and then Itachi would be waiting for him there and he would ask him for help with his _katon _and then Itachi would say, "Sorry Sasuke, I'm busy now. Maybe next time, okay?" And then he would poke him on the forehead and he would turn back towards whatever he had been doing, and then he wouldn't be

_gone_

…

…

…

_all of them are gone. _

_And it's all Itachi's fault. _

Sasuke Uchiha started crying. Childish sniffles gave way to gasps for air and gut-wrenching moans, and as the nurse skidded back out into the hall and cried down the corridor for someone, for anyone, to come and help, to _get someone goddamnit_, the last Uchiha in Konoha wailed.

###

He had to take a lot of tests after he woke up.

Motor-function tests. Coordination tests. Eyesight tests. X-rays. Chakra imbalance tests. Chakra invasion tests. Chakra corruption tests.

No one in the hospital knew what Itachi had done (or _may have done_) to his little brother to put him in a three week long coma, and half of them were certain the missing-nin had planted some sort of delayed genjutsu in the shinobi-in-training, something that would trigger at the opportune moment and make him just as much a killer as his brother. The other half merely suspected it.

He wasn't supposed to know this, of course. He _didn't_ want to know it. But not all of the medical staff was made up of medical-ninjas, and gossip carried just as well from a ninja to a civilian as it did from one civilian to another. The difference was that civilians were _loud_.

Oh, they probably thought that they were quiet. They whispered and muttered and acted like they were talking about the weather or how old the Sandaime was or any number of things adults normally muttered about. But Sasuke was a ninja, from a long line of very, _very_ good ones, and even good shinobi quickly become _dead_ shinobi unless they have superlative hearing.

So, he heard every word.

He didn't really care what they thought.

For the most part, he just stared ahead, dead-eyed, eating when there was food in front of him and going to the bathroom when he needed to.

This, of course, spawned other rumors to accompany the brainwashing ones.

He was a vegetable. He'd been lobotomized. Whatever his brother had done had destroyed his higher functions. Whatever his brother had done to him was still in effect, and he had no idea what was going on around him. He was waiting for his brother to come back and finish the job.

None of them were right.

Though not all of them were precisely wrong.

###

The first time he left the hospital, he went straight home, back to the Uchiha complex. He had to see what was left. He was convinced, somehow, that his home would still be his _home_.

The streets, which had once bustled with life as his clan went about its business, were empty, lifeless. Cold concrete and dead wood that had once seemed so safe was now merely that, casts and molds where there had once been homes and shops. There was no blood splattered across the walls. There was no proof that anyone had ever lived there at all, even the kind caused by violence.

The main clan buildings, ornate, traditional, were all but gone. The shoji separators that had given them their shape had vanished, most likely burned by Itachi. What they left behind were porches without purpose and empty squares of room, alone and open to the air.

Sasuke knew his home by heart. He was quick to find the room where he had last seen his brother.

There was nothing there. Clean. Empty. The floor was gleaming in the midday sun, recently cleaned, almost as if his mother had just been through. No blood, no bodies, nothing to prove that his family had been murdered in there a month ago.

The furniture was missing. No dressers, no beds. He didn't know if they'd been moved by whoever had cleaned the room, or if someone else had taken them. He wouldn't have disbelieved it if someone had told him. His father had always been talking about how jealous the village was of the Uchiha, of their power and wealth. Others swooping in and picking goods from the recently emptied house would be just what his father had told him would happen.

He wandered around what had been the room for about ten minutes before someone else arrived. ANBU. Like Itachi had been. It was a tall, wiry man with a dog mask, a permanent frown engraved on its porcelain-like face.

This wasn't how it was supposed to go. Normally, the Uchiha police handled matters within the village as trivial as escaped patients. It was something that his father had also ranted about, in length. The inanity of some of the jobs that the village had delegated the old, proud family had infuriated his Otou-san.

But of course, the Uchiha Police force was gone. His brother had killed them all. And so, instead of a familiar face with Sharingan eyes showing up to collect him, the village had had to send ANBU to take him back. Expressionless white stared at him as the man moved closer, doing his best in full shinobi gear to appear unthreatening.

He didn't resist as the man's _shunshin_ carried them both back to the roof of the hospital.

###

The next day, he was introduced to Doctor Izuma. She was older than his mom, but not by much. Her hair was graying, but there were laugh lines around her mouth that made her look much younger. Her coat, strict and white and professional, did its best too make her just as colorless as the rest of the hospital, but even it couldn't contain the vibrancy in her eyes.

Sasuke instantly disliked her. He couldn't say why. There was just something unfair; that this doctor lady could smile with her eyes while his mom would never smile again.

"Hello, Sasuke. I'm Dr. Izuma. I'm going to be your counselor for the next couple of days, okay?" she said with, while not exactly cheerfulness, definite optimism.

"Okay." He muttered. He didn't say anything else.

Her eyes smiled a little less, but she went forward anyway. "Sasuke." she started. Already, he was starting to hate the sound of her voice. It was too light. "You've been through something truly, truly terrible. I'm here to help you however I can. Believe me, I know how you feel-"

Sasuke's hands clenched violently, strangling the bed sheets that covered them for a moment, before relaxing. Though he didn't notice, Izuma took note of it.

"Well, maybe not exactly." She amended. "But like I said, I'm here to help however I can. So, Sasuke, is there anything you want to tell me?"

He stared at her for a moment, not understanding.

Tell her? Tell her? Tell her what? Tell her that he'd had an average day at the academy, that that idiot Naruto had tried to spar with him and he'd put him on his back in less than a second and then he'd stuck around after school waiting for his nii-san to pick him up because his brother had _promised_ to but he hadn't cause he _never_ kept his promises and then he'd gone home by himself because it was obvious that Itachi wasn't coming and then when he'd gotten there-

When he'd gotten there-

He was crying again. Ninja weren't supposed to cry.

He felt a weight settle down on the bed, and when he looked over, he found Dr. Izuma there. She was probably going to tell him what a failure was, how shinobi weren't supposed to cry, how he'd been too weak to help his family, how he should have done something, done anything, to stop Itachi from-

Warm arms settled around him, and he blinked. Tears forgotten for a second, he looked up into her damnably warm eyes, and instead of condemnation and contempt he instead found in them sadness and pity.

"Sasuke." She said, her voice gentle. "Sasuke, it's okay to cry. You have to let it out."

He didn't want to. He didn't want to-

_Hate me._

Itachi wasn't-

_Fear me._

He would never have-

_Cling to life, foolish little brother._

But he had.

The tears started again, and Sasuke clung to the only warmth he could find in the cold sterility of the hospital.

###

To say that Sasuke Uchiha was damaged was a tremendous understatement.

To say he was beyond repair would be a blatant exaggeration.

After a month of treatment, Izuma Gisei still didn't know quite what to think of her young patient. She had done this for two decades, and in all her years she'd never had to deal with a case quite as traumatic as this one.

Loved ones died. In a Hidden Village, where a significant amount of the population was made up of either ninjas or their relatives, this was a fact of life. People didn't come back from missions. People didn't come back from wars. Even a training exercise could steal away a family member if it went terribly wrong (or depending on the Jōnin sensei, horribly right). There was a significant orphan population in Konoha because of this. However, loss was not looked upon as something crippling. It was accepted, an inevitably in life, though one that everyone dreaded nonetheless.

But Sasuke…

Sasuke was different.

Sasuke hadn't just lost his parents, or his brother. He'd lost _everyone_. In a single night, his entire world had been ripped away, leaving him floundering with no idea of what to do. Every perception he had had been created and maintained by his family. Without them in his life, he had no anchor. He was old enough to understand the loss, to understand that something was missing, but not old enough to create his own reality. He didn't even have a nindō to fall back on.

And to add to his confusion, it was his brother who had caused all this pain.

Izuma could claim to know Sasuke well after spending so much time with him. Though he put an air of emptiness out around him, an aura of carelessness, she had seen what was beneath that coma-like exterior.

Sasuke was furious.

Seething. Enraged.

_Angry._

It would come without warning. One moment he would be calm, sitting, talking to her about his mother or how great his obā-san's cooking was, and the next there would be a spike of cold, an intense sensation of freezing that made her feel like an ant, helpless and small, and in that chill there would be such _hate_ that it sometimes made her just want to leave the room and get as far from the unassuming onyx-eyed child as quickly as possible.

It happened whenever he was reminded, in any way, of his brother. The smallest thing could set it off. ANBU armor. The color red. Even the word itself was enough of a trigger to send him into a lightning-fast fit of utter rage.

At first, she had believed this was a natural reaction. His brother had been directly responsible for the tragedies that night, after all. It would only be rational for the one most affected by his actions to hate him for them. But what Sasuke felt towards Itachi Uchiha was far, far too strong to have just stemmed from that. It felt extremely personal.

Even after a month of therapy, she still hadn't found out exactly what Itachi had done to Sasuke that night. The boy had been found in the streets of the Uchiha Complex with a single deep cut on his right shoulder, bruising on his stomach, and a multitude of scratches and bruises on his knees and chest that were consistent with taking a small fall.

Neither of those explained why he had been unconscious for nearly a month after the massacre.

"Genjutsu, most likely," was what her recently hired assistant had postulated, and she was inclined to agree with him. All of the chakra tests done on Sasuke had agreed that some foreign chakra had been forced into his system during the night, and that it was still subtly affecting him.

She had to figure out what that genjutsu had been if she was going to make any true progress with him, and if it had any chance of influencing his future actions. The Uchiha, she knew, were masters of all kinds of illusions and Ninjutsu, and she wouldn't have put it past the village prodigy Itachi to have planted some sort of trap in his brother before leaving.

Why else would he have spared him?

So, the next time she visited Sasuke, she decided to push.

"Sasuke?"

"Hn?"

"What exactly happened that night?"

Sasuke, who had been toying with an apple at his bedside table, stopped. Rolling it from side to side, redirecting it at the last second so that it wouldn't fly off, had been a good way of distracting himself. Without his hand to guide it, the apple keeled over and fell from the grain surface, bouncing off the hospital floor.

He didn't try to stop it.

"…Everyone died." He muttered.

"I know, Sasuke."

"I… I showed up too late to help them."

"No, Sasuke. If you'd shown up earlier, then you would just be-"

"I wouldn't! He wouldn't!" He snapped at her.

"Sasuke, just because he's your brother-"

"That Man wouldn't have killed me if I'd shown up!"

There was silence for a moment, as Sasuke took deep breaths and bunched his shirt, while Izuma stared at him.

"What?"

"He… he wanted me to live. To get more powerful."

"Sasuke- you can't believe-"

"That was the last thing he said to me. He said 'Cling to life. And when you have the same eyes that I have, come to me.'"

He paused again, doing his best to seem calm and failing. Izuma did her best to sort out what he had just said. His brother had spoken to him? Had told him to live?

And what was that about "the same eyes"?

She decided to ask that first.

"The same eyes? You mean the Sharingan?"

"No. Well, yes, but… different. His eyes were different."

"What do you mean?"

"The normal sharingan is a wheel, with three tomoe in it. Itachi's… Itachi's was like that, but then it _changed_. It was more like a- like a- shuriken. Like a fūma shuriken…"

He paused.

"And when he looked at me…"

Sasuke shivered, and fell silent.

Izuma knew that sign. He was having a flashback. Normally, whenever he fell into one of these, he would remain quiet for up to hours at a time, before coming back to the present like it had never happened.

Which is why she was surprised when he spoke up again not five seconds later.

"He showed me."

What?

"Showed you what, Sasuke?"

"He showed me… everything."

And with that, he subsided again.

Izuma didn't understand. Everything? Itachi had shown Sasuke _everything_? What could that possibly-

_Oh._

_OH._

_EVERYTHING._

Suddenly, many things about Sasuke behavior that had prickled at her suddenly made an uncomfortable amount of sense. His utter, horribly personal hatred of his brother, something that no one that young should be capable of. His constant flashbacks to an encounter that logically should only have lasted a minute or two. His _knowing_ that everyone he knew was dead.

Itachi had _shown_ him. Shown him personally. _That_ was the chakra found in his system. His own brother had shoved him into some sort of sick genjutsu or show within the mind, and he had displayed, well-

_EVERYTHING_.

Izuma, seeing that Sasuke had once again fallen back into a fugue, squeezed his shoulder and rushed out of the room.

She had to add this to her report. This kind of information about his psyche, about what he had seen, it would change everything.

###

She rushed through the hospital; slow enough to leave people time to get out of her way but fast enough for them to know she meant business. Her office was on the fifth floor, while Sasuke's room was on the third. It took her about five minutes to get there.

When she arrived, she found that it was empty but for her assistant, who was sitting at his desk, eyeing some paperwork that fluttered in the breeze of the opened window as it did its best to escape the weight atop it and drinking coffee. He looked at her over the brim of the cup, his glasses shining in the fluorescent light.

"Back already, Izuma-san? How was Sasuke-kun today?"

She didn't pause as she bustled towards her desk, and the dossier there.

"Informative." She said, busying herself with flipping through the forms for her patient's mental health files. "In fact, I think I learned today why his recovery is moving along so slowly."

That got her assistant to stop drinking. He looked up at her from his chair with wide eyes. "Really? You finally cracked him?"

"This isn't T&I. I hardly "cracked him", as you call it." She said, as she finally found Sasuke Uchiha's page. She realised she didn't have a pen, and bent down to see if there were any in the drawers of her desk. "I just finally managed to get him to open up a bit more."

"So? What was it?" He looked eager to know. The mystery of Sasuke Uchiha's coma, and the pool over whether it had been based solely on trauma or genjutsu, was something that had been oft discussed in the wards of the hospital.

Izuma finally managed to find a pen in the clutter of her desk and triumphantly held it up into the air. "Genjutsu." She said with finality. "And probably one of the nastiest ones I've ever heard of."

"Really?"

"Oh yes." she said, as she stared at her patient's files. "Apparently, Itachi Uchiha left his brother with a parting gift." Her assistant rolled his eyes. "We all knew _that_." He drawled. "What was it?"

Izuma distractedly replied. "He showed him everything that had happened that night."

There was silence for a moment. "Everyth-"

"Everything." Izuma confirmed. "Or at least as Itachi wanted Sasuke to see it. So I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually _worse_ than what happened."

The man with glasses winced. "Ouch. So… what are you going to do?"

Izuma looked up at him. "The academy has been clamoring for its best student to come back. And several members of the civilian council have backed it up. But… the Hokage has asked me personally to insure that Sasuke Uchiha was to return to daily life when he was _ready_. And now," she bit her lip, "now I'm not sure he could _ever_ be ready. Much less become a shinobi of the Leaf."

Her assistant blinked. "But- but he's an Uchiha." He said it like it explained everything, and in a way it did. There had _never_ been a civilian Uchiha.

"I know. But the kind of damage his brother has done to him… he'll never be able to function as part of a team. He's never going to completely trust anyone ever again. And he has this… _compulsion_ to grow more powerful. His brother told him to come after him once he was strong enough, so now…"

She paused as a thought occurred to her.

"_That's _the trap. _That's the trap_!"

"Huh?"

"We've all been thinking about this wrong! It's just simple psychology! We all thought Itachi must have placed some sort of trigger phrase or something in Sasuke's head that would brainwash him when he was older or something like that, but it's not nearly that complicated! Or easy to dismantle, for that matter!"

Izuma was pacing around the room, her files forgotten while she gesticulated wildly, as her assistant watched her, seemingly uncomprehending. "I still don't get it." He said.

"Itachi has placed himself as the first priority in Sasuke's life. He now regards anything that is not related to his brother as a secondary importance. Which means that if he ever _does_ grow strong enough to take on his brother, he'll leave Konoha in an instant for the chance." She turned to him. "That is the trap. Itachi is hoping to destroy the Uchiha both physically and in the memory of the people. What better way of doing that then making his brother a powerful shinobi in Konoha, and then forcing him to go missing-nin? It's brilliant!"

She moved back to the desk, pen still in hand. Bending over Sasuke's psyche report, she began to write. "We can't let him become a ninja now. Who knows what he might do when he's grown up. No, it'll be better to keep him here, without training. Safer for the village, for sure."

As she wrote, she heard her assistant stand up. "So, Sasuke will be pronounced unfit for duty, then? Such a shame."

"It really is, but I can say without a doubt-"

There was a flash of movement in the corner of her vision, the sound of paper flapping in the wind, and suddenly Izuma was pressed against the window of her office, her waist bent painfully backwards as her hair whipped in the breeze. Her legs were still in the office: everything else was not. She kicked wildly for a moment, before stilling as her breath was abruptly cut off.

Her assistant's hand gripped her throat with the kind of strength only shinobi were capable of, and as he stared at her the light caught his glasses in such a way that the only thing visible on his face was his expressionless line of a mouth.

She choked, and the grip loosened a little. "What are you doing? What is this?" she gasped. He offered no response.

"Kabuto, why?"

Fourteen-year-old Kabuto Yakushi, accomplished medical-ninja and assistant to Izuma Gisei, gave her a microscopic smile.

"Because Orochimaru-sama wills it."

Then he let her go.

###

Amegakure was a very wet village. Appropriate, considering that it _was_ the Village Hidden in the Rain, but startling none-the-less. Itachi had never seen so much rain in his life, a constant downpour that drowned out all noise beside itself and made visibility a distant dream.

Growing up in Hi no Kuni hadn't prepared him for weather like this. Everything was moist and damp, no matter what time of day it was. Intellectually, Itachi also knew that the changing of the seasons would make a dent in this rain either: it was an omnipresent force of nature. But he hadn't quite grasped those implications yet. Konoha was _never_ wet like this. The weather was almost always temperate and fair; it was a rare day that saw the sun blocked out by clouds, and rarer yet to actually see _rainfall_.

Amegakure was dramatically different from Konoha in ways besides the obvious change in weather, as well. The Village Hidden in the Leaves was constructed almost entirely out of wood and steel. Not normal wood, of course, but rather one of the many legacies of Hashirama Senju, the Shodaime Hokage: the so-called Mokuton Tree had provided the lion's share of the wood for the village. The product of the legendary Wood Release Kekkai Genkai, the Mokuton Tree produced wood that was far, far stronger than such a material had any right to be. Flexible, practically impossible to shatter, and fireproof, it was the perfect building material.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the Shodaime had nearly built the village singlehandedly.

But Amegakure was nothing like Konoha. Everything here was young, and instead of ancient heartwood and tempered steel, corrugated iron and rust dominated the village. War after war had wracked Rain Country over the years, and Amegakure, as the military center, had been destroyed, and rebuilt, many times. Thus cheap, rather than hardy, materials were the basic blocks of the village. Everything here had been built in less than a year, and Itachi knew that with just a little know how it could be torn down in less than a month.

The constant rain was making him moody, and the iron facades, protruding pipes, and constant stink of rot didn't help.

Everything was always wet here. The rain was everywhere. It got in between your toes, seeped into the tiny cracks between the nails and the soft inner flesh. If you weren't careful, it filled them with rot: the water here wasn't clean. Shortsighted industry, the messy kind that filled rivers with sludge and made the rain taste like battery acid, had tainted the land around Amegakure for a long time. Even under the new leader of Amegakure, it would take decades for any meaningful progress to be made on cleaning the water supplies.

At least his new uniform kept the worst of the weathers effects from him.

Itachi was a utilitarian, but even he had to admit that the red-cloud cloak that Madara had given him was extremely effective. It was practically immune to water: the rain slid right off of it, and it kept him far warmer than it should have, considering how thin the material was. If he didn't know what a gross waste of resources it was, he would have suspected some fuinjutsu had gone into these cloaks.

The polish on his nails repelled the rain just as effectively as his cloak did. Itachi had never thought he would be glad for such a thing, but he had some of the villagers here, the extremities of their fingers blackened and seemingly dripping off, flowing away with the rest of the rain. If a little nail polish was necessary to keep that from happening to him, he was more than happy to apply it.

Itachi couldn't believe, as stared out onto the iron village all but obscured by the torrent of filthy water, that he had already spent two whole months in this miserable place. It seemed to him that the days and nights were flowing together. It was probably the rain's fault, ceaseless as it was. It hid the sun and the moon and the stars. Itachi had been counting the hours, but after he had reached one hundred he had given in to the seeming timelessness of his new home.

Now, all he had to mark the time were visits from his ancestor.

Itachi didn't know how often Madara visited. But he did know why. The masked man was teaching him about his new eyes, the Mangekyo Sharingan: their powers, their strengths, and their many, many limitations. He taught him about the seemingly unstoppable power of Susanoo, and also that, despite the feeling of invincibility and omnipotence, the ultimate defense would leave his new eyes darkened and blind after just a few uses; unless he took his brother's, of course.

Madara's smirking tone made Itachi want to destroy the man with his newly awakened Ameterasu. But he knew, of course, that he wouldn't have a ghost of a chance for a long, long time.

Sometimes the lessons blurred into one another, particularly the ones that involved mastering his Tsukuyomi. Madara was always a hands-on teacher. If he wanted to teach Itachi how to create a more compelling illusion, he placed him in one.

If Itachi had once been able to put up a façade that made stone look expressive, now he was positively glacial. Madara hadn't approved of the few emotions Itachi had let slip through whilst under Tsukuyomi: the first time Madara had shown him a disemboweled Sasuke along with his parents, he'd flinched. It had been more than enough. The man had beaten him savagely for what seemed like hours, cracking his ribs and snapping his arms and legs like toothpicks, chakra reinforcement be damned, and then lit him with the semi-divine fires of Ameterasu, finally letting him succumb to death as he desperately tried to breathe through lungs that were cracked and shriveled with the heat as his spine melted and filled his guts with volcanic marrow.

Of course, that had been a genjutsu as well. So had the time after that, and the time after that.

There hadn't been a fourth time.

Itachi knew, deep inside, that Madara had broken something in him in the past months. He also knew that he should be worried about that. He wasn't. He knew that he should be worried that he wasn't worried, but he didn't let it trouble him. If seeing the world through deadened eyes with a constant expression of boredom and a complete lack of concern was the price for Sasuke's life and Madara's death, Itachi would be glad to pay it a hundred times over.

In a strange, distant way, he was glad that Madara had "gifted" him with an unprecedented level of impassiveness. It made dealing with the impressive amount of incredibly dangerous shinobi that were gathered in the Akatsuki compound much easier.

The organization was small. Very small, or so Madara had told him. In all honesty, to Itachi it seemed more like a club than something that could be dubbed an "organization". There were only six members, after all.

Though now, he supposed, there were seven, assuming Madara wasn't just lying and there were in fact seven hundred members. Every individual that Madara had told him about was infamous around the ninja world; mass murderers, myths, and most surely of all, traitors.

Yes, Itachi definitely belonged with this group.

And though every moment of every day he yearned to cut loose, to take as much of this corrupt organization with him as possible in a dying blaze of Uchiha finesse, he couldn't afford to. He couldn't die just yet.

Sasuke. It always came back to Sasuke. His little brother, who now without a doubt had set his murder as his dream in life, was now his lifeline. It was only the thought of him that kept Itachi from giving up completely.

Sasuke had to live, and Madara had to die.

AN: Why yes I have been reading Stephen King lately. Why do you ask?

Oh, and I'm definitely not a counselor, nor a psychology major, so if my feeble attempt at portraying just a _little_ psychology is off… ninja's do it differently?

To the ten or so people who are following this thing, sorry this took so long to put out. College is hard. Also, what you just read used to be three chapters. One focused on Izuma, one on Sasuke, and the last on Itachi, but I wasn't especially happy with any of them (particularly Itachi's. Freaking nebulous dates…). However, I mashed them all together, cut off a lot of the fat, added a subplot about Kabuto, and viola! I found myself with an average chapter.

I'm still not completely happy with it (freaking line breaks), so they'll probably be edits in the future, especially if I ever get a beta. Speaking of not happy: I've been looking at my outline, and I _hate it_. It seems like it'll take me thirty thousand or so words just to get to Sasuke being a Genin, and I _don't_ want that. So, query: do you guys want a kind of snapshot format till we get to the interesting stuff (at which point we run through the modified stations of canon, with Itachi an alongside perspective) or a wholesale timeskip, with sprinkled flashbacks? I can do either, but I want a couple secondary opinions first.

Anyway, last thing: I have a favorites list now, so if you want to read some _good_, not-two-chapters-long fanfiction, you should check that out.

Sorry this note was so long. Thanks for reading.


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